TY - BOOK AU - Gowrisankaran,Gautam AU - Town,Robert J. ED - National Bureau of Economic Research. TI - Managed Care, Drug Benefits and Mortality: An Analysis of the Elderly T2 - NBER working paper series PY - 2004/// CY - Cambridge, Mass. PB - National Bureau of Economic Research N1 - January 2004; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers N2 - We seek to investigate whether managed health care can affect mortality, and if so, through which mechanisms. We estimate the impact of Medicare+Choice (M+C), Medicare's managed care program, on elderly mortality, using a county-level panel from 1993 to 2000. We control for endogenous M+C penetration rates with county fixed effects and instrumental variables. We construct instruments using the identification created by the fact that M+C payment rates are based on 3 to 8 year lagged fee-for-service (FFS) costs in the county. We find that enrollment in managed care without prescription drug coverage significantly increases mortality while enrollment in managed care with drug coverage has no significant impact, both relative to FFS. The impact of managed care penetration on mortality from heart disease appears to follow a similar pattern. The estimates suggest that a 10-percentage point increase in M+C non-drug coverage would cause 51,000 additional deaths among the aged population in 2000 UR - https://www.nber.org/papers/w10204 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w10204 ER -